For years Mr. Wilson's work did not interest me much; The Hot l Baltimore, his big hit, struck me as rather tired in its conventionality. But with 5th of July last year,… it seemed to me that Mr. Wilson was on to something: there was a new vividness, a new vigor….

Mr. Wilson's new vigor, if not his new vividness, has ebbed noticeably in Talley's Folly, however, and the old sentimentality has resurged.

On this occasion Mr. Wilson is quite up front about being sentimental; in an opening monologue, Matt tells us that we are in for a "valentine," a "waltz."…

Matt is the Jewish stereotype in its most idealized form: warm, wise, witty, well-read, gentle, bespectacled and shaped by suffering. But I am here to tell you that there still are warm, wise, witty, well-read, gentle, bespectacled, Jewish men around, and even the suffering seems right for 1944. Matt is much nicer than any Jew that a Jewish writer would dream of creating, but, that granted, Mr. Wilson has written him impeccably. Not only are the cadences of Yiddish-inspired English rendered with authenticity and grace; the thinking and the experience behind them seem Jewish too….

Sally also belongs to a type, somewhat less defined in her case: the young woman too spunky and intelligent for the mean-minded small town she lives in….

Talley's Folly is funny and charming…. I don't even mind its sentimentality as such, much. Matt Friedman believes that people have "Humpty-Dumpty complexes": they think they're eggs, and are afraid to let other people get through their shells, and so lose out on life. A truth—and the play demonstrates, quite touchingly at moments, what good things can happen when people leave their Humpty-Dumpty complexes behind.

What got me down about Talley's Folly was the damned predictability and repetitiousness of it—not the inevitability of the happy ending, but the way nothing happens on the way to the happy ending that wasn't obviously going to happen.